Eric Metaxas - Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life

Praise for

Fish Out of Water

In this portrait of Metaxas as a young man, deeply serious matters exist most comfortably with great wit and maximum humor. As enjoyable as it is to follow him from birth through the fog of his twenties and into the sunlight at their end, you will see that you have also painlessly embraced a wonderful complexity. Even the title represents multiple meanings woven throughout the book that are, as in the solution to a mystery, unified and made clear at its end. I read it in the sunshine, which was entirely appropriate.

MARK HELPRIN, New York Times bestselling author of many books, including Winters Tale and A Soldier of the Great War

Eric Metaxas [is] one of our nations most brilliant and morally serious public intellectuals.

ROBERT P. GEORGE, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University

Metaxas is a major writer. Not to be missed.

DICK CAVETT, legendary American television personality

This memoir of one of our best writers coming of age is a beautiful thing: deeply intelligent, spiritually acute, and laugh-out-loud funny.

BRET LOTT, bestselling author of fourteen books, including Jewel, an Oprahs Book Club selection

A wonderful story wonderfully told. Eric Metaxas knows how to tell complex things simply and serious things with lively wit. He is that rare and delightful being: a terrific writer with something important to say.

ANDREW KLAVAN, international bestselling author and two-time Edgar Award winner

The story rolls along and carries us with it, hilarious and heartbreaking by turns, vivid and contemplative, and regularly touched with poetry. Eric Metaxas is a brilliant communicator.

FREDERICA MATHEWES-GREEN, Orthodox Christian author and speaker

According to Dostoevsky, when Russian boys meet, they talk about God. Reading the book by Eric Metaxas, I felt the author and myself as such Russian boys. His youth was spent in the U.S.A., mine in the U.S.S.R.countries, to put it mildly, that are very different. Despite this, we are remarkably similar. This concerns our first literary impressions (special thanks to Werther!), our first own discoveries, and most importantly, what are commonly called universal values. Only good books create unity between author and readerwherever each of them may live. Fish Out of Water is such a book. It sparkles with wonderful humor. This only happens with the most serious books.

EUGENE VODOLAZKIN, author of Laurus

Truth really is stranger than fictionstranger, less predictable, often (though not always) funnier, and weirder. Reality is not fastidious and doesnt pay any attention to opinion polls. Hence the appeal of this memoir by Eric Metaxas, an account of his formative years: a zany tale of literary aspirations.

JOHN WILSON, former Books & Culture editor (19952016), contributing editor for the Englewood Review of Books, and senior editor at the Marginalia Review of Books

With his inimitable intelligence and wit, Eric Metaxas recounts his formative years as a first-generation immigrant, the crucial development of his ability to think for himself rather than following the herd, and the process of learning to follow his heart and mind wherever the truth leads.

JILL LAMAR, former editor-in-chief of Henry Holt and Company and curator of new titles for Barnes & Noble

A delight! Eric Metaxas has crafted for each discerning reader a personal gift: A richly detailed, lovingly remembered American story that faces squarely serious issues to which every one of us should attend. From the struggles of immigrant families to bullying in school, from the trauma that victims of war and totalitarianism carry to the hunger for meaning that postmodern students face in college, Eric uses his own experience to illumine enduring, important questions. He does so with humor [and] moral insight.

JOHN ZMIRAK, editor at The Stream

How do brave men advance through adversity with courage and then summon courage from the rest of us? Read Eric Metaxass artfully scrappy memoir to cultivate courage and meet the public intellectual behind the books that we love. This memoir stands as a beacon to a world lost to us, and casts a tractor beam to a future which demands virtue, bravery, courage, and personal sacrifice.

ROSARIA BUTTERFIELD, author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

Copyright 2021 by Eric Metaxas

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

Cover photo by Annerose Kraegen.

Salem Books is a trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation

Regnery is a registered trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation

ISBN: 978-1-68451-172-3

eISBN: 978-1-68451-174-7

Cover design by Ed Tuttle

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945141

Published in the United States by

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This book is for my father and mother,

and for Charis Conn, who swan-dove into the

period at the end of the sentence God wrote for her

and emerged in His presence in Heaven

O ne night in the summer of 1988 I had a dream. It was so powerful that it changed my life utterly and forever. Although Im essentially the same person I was before the dream, it was so unprecedented and otherworldly that its perfectly fair to say Im also not at all the same person I was before. Please understand that this was an actual dream; it happened while I was sleeping and unconscious. And I think that what the dream really didand did astonishingly exquisitely and brilliantlywas make sense of my life up until that point. But in doing that, it has also made sense of my life going forward; it has lent deep meaning and purpose to my life ever since. There is no hyperbole here. Eternity broke into my life while I was sleeping and worked its ways backwards and forwards, making sense of the past and the future. Im afraid that for you to appreciate what Im trying to say you need to know the story of my life until the dream happened. This is that story.

I t was February 2, 2012, and I was at the podium at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., eight feet away from President Barack Obama, who was politely giving me his rapt attention in that monstrously vast Hilton Hotel ballroom outside of which President Ronald Reagan was shot by a man inspired to his assassination attempt by a woman with whom I once danced at Yale.

Next to the president on the dais was the first lady. Near me was Nancy Pelosi, and right next to me was Vice President Joe Biden, with whom I had been chit-chatting uncomfortably, seriously tongue-tied by a combination of three hours sleep and a knowledge of him unfairly compromised by the hysterical articles about him in the parodic